Question

I have an indefinite amount of items in an array:

$query = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM orders WHERE orderID = '$orderID'");        

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)){
   $items[] = $row[itemnumber];
   $quantity[] = $row[quantity];
   $vendoremail[] = $row[vendoremail];
} 

The values in the arrays could be something like this:

 $items = ("A","B", "C");
    $quantity = ("2", "1", "3");
    $vendoremail = ("[e-mail]", "[e-mail]", "[e-mail]");

I want to group the data from the same email addresses and send a single email to each address.

So one email gets sent to [e-mail] with the items “A” and “C” and quantity “2” and “3” in the body of the email.

And another email gets sent to [e-mail] with the items “B” and quantity “1” in the body of the email.

Anybody know the best way to accomplish this?

Answer 1

You can group the values into comma-separated strings via GROUP_CONCAT() and optionally split them back up in PHP:

SELECT 
  GROUP_CONCAT(itemnumber) AS items,
  GROUP_CONCAT(quantity) AS quantities,
  vendoremail
FROM orders
WHERE orderid = '$orderID'
GROUP BY vendoremail

This will produce results like:

[e-mail]    A,C    2,3
[e-mail]    B      1

In PHP, if you need to you can explode() the lists back out into arrays to display in the email body.

$results = array();
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($query)){
   $results[] = $row; 
}
foreach ($results as $result) {
  $email = $result['vendoremail'];
  $items = explode(",", $result['items']); // now it's an array...
  $quantities = explode(",", $result['quantities']);  // now it's an array...
}